The Hidden History of Nineties Lollapalooza
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the uncensored story of alternative rock's wildest festival by tom beaujour and richard beanstalk that really digs into the stories from those years with bands from pearl jam to sonic youth to smashing pumpkins to metallica to hull and i have tom and richard here today to share some of the wildest moments from the book guys last time around i spoke to you about your great book about 80s hard rock how did you get the idea to do lollapalooza as your next thing

We had done a previous book together, Nothing But a Good Time, which is about the 80s hard rock industry. And when it came time to do the next project, I mean, we threw around some ideas, but I think Lollapalooza was the one that we both loved.

landed on and we're really excited about doing because I think a few things. One, you know, as much as I'll just speak for me, but maybe Tom feels the same way, as much as the 80s stuff in the last book was my childhood, 90s alternative rock is my childhood too. I went into high school in 1990. So like Lollapalooza was my high school years and that was the music that I was listening to. It's sort of

where the last book left off, which is grunge and alternative coming in and sort of destroying that whole scene. That's kind of where this book starts. And a lot of the guys that are in this book, guys like Kim Thayil and guys like Jerry Cantrell, were in our last book at the end sort of talking about the beginnings of this scene. So it was a really easy flow to just go into this book. And then I think that

The Lollapalooza part of it, too. I mean, you get to tell the story of the creation of this festival industry, really, in the U.S., and that's where it all starts. And so you get to tell, it's like a dual story, the rise of alternative rock and also the rise of festival culture.

It's so weird to me, just on a fundamental level. I never went, but it's so weird to remember this was happening in amphitheaters, which is not a festival. Like that's not how festivals work other than the closest thing to the way festivals are now. We're like this, the parking lot side stage. It's just weird to think about. It's amazing that it even worked when you think that it was in amphitheaters. I mean, the thing too is that at that time, the amphitheaters were brand new. There's

This was like a new phenomenon in the touring landscape. It was a bugaboo that I think plagued them all the way through the tour because there is a constant sort of refrain in our book. You know, the bands that went on early because they were playing in front of reserved seats that were not full did not have great experience.

You know, like the first, second band was invariably at Lollapalooza playing in one of these amphitheaters to like nine people in front. And then the kids who are like the super music fans are up on the lawn in back having a great time. But it's this super fun.

sort of strange dissociative feeling the bands are having because they're trying to play to people so far away and trying to hold it together. But they kind of had to do it that way because they needed to go into places that had the infrastructure. Later on, they're able to carry...

all of that, you know, but like if they had had to really throw up the stage every time and carry everything bathrooms and stuff, it wouldn't have been feasible to do the tour. But it was not an ideal situation. And in fact, in 1996, when Metallica headlines, they refused to do amphitheaters. And anyone you talk to who saw one of the few Lollapalooza that were like in a field,

I think had a much actually better time at those shows. I think it's also important to remember, especially for younger people, that,

to remember slash realize that in the 90s, before Coachella kicked off just after Woodstock 99 at the end of the decade, there was no festival culture in America, period. There was no equivalent of Reading or anything. This was the first time that someone tried to do something sort of like that. And of course, it was Perry Farrell and Mark Iger and all these people. But they did it in this fascinating mutant way of a traveling festival. Yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of like a double whammy, right? Like you said, there's no festival culture at all. And plus, there's no touring festivals. That concept doesn't really exist. So it really was this kind of outlandish conceit, which I think is something that maybe Perry specializes in. And I think even guys like Mark Iger, you know, like...

specializes in having that kind of idea and then making it a reality. I mean, Mark Geiger came from the world of like working with the Pixies in the fall and all those kinds of bands and seeing that they could play festivals in the UK and you can get enough kids together that like this kind of music that you could put them on big stages. And I think nobody that didn't occur to people in the US. And so I think that the beginnings of this book, it's a fascinating story because you see them

not only conceptualizing what this is going to be, but like, how are we going to sell this thing to both the fans and also promoters and the industry? Because it's like, okay, we don't have festivals here. We don't have touring festivals here. We're going to try all that. Plus we're going to do it with outside of Jane's addiction and probably living color at that time, a whole bunch of bands that could never fill these types of venues. And we're going to put them on these big stages out in fields. And we're going to get 15,000 kids to come.

every night. And we're also going to give them like weird food. And we're also going to give them like hemp bracelets and underground bookstores and progressive political tents and all this stuff. And like, that's what we're going to do. You know, as a promoter, do you want to buy into this? And some promoters were like, yes. And some were like, uh-uh. Don Muller and Mark Iger, who were the agents, talk about having a strong arm, a lot of these guys, and use their leverage to

for what they had done in the past to be like, you gotta, you gotta try this thing. And plus we're calling it Lollapalooza, which what the hell is that? Um, and it works. A lot of young people don't even realize that it was a touring festival anymore. And that is because actually, although it's this huge thing for 10 years, um,

The touring festival is now gone again, and it's really an artifact of a bygone era. We talked to the organizers, and really, basically, so it's like if you were going to concerts in the 90s, suddenly you had Lollapalooza first, and then you have Warped Tour, and you have OzFest, and you have Lilith Fair, and you have the Horde Tour, and sort of that's suddenly the dominant concert experience, and then it disappears, and according to the founders who are still booking agents, it is literally something that would be totally impossible to do.

to do now. There's no universe given what bands get paid and logistics where a touring festival could be pulled off where the tickets weren't like $2,800 instead of the $2,800 that Lollapalooza was. So it is really this weird moment in

in time, which will not be repeated. It also has the weird thing that Perry Farrell originally sort of just wanted it to be a Jane's Addiction farewell tour glorified with a bunch of other bands. And of course, there was no reason for it to be a farewell tour so early in their career other than the fact that they were all on drugs and fucking hated each other. That's a good reason. Yeah. It's a good reason, but also a terrible reason, you know, because it's like you would think, you know, for better or worse, everyone around them would just be like, no, like,

you're not breaking up, you know, like you're on the cusp of like major stardom here. But, but yeah, I mean, I think that that's also one of the things you see here, like,

It's a Jane's Addiction farewell tour, and we've talked about this, but they clearly did not call it the Jane's Addiction farewell tour. They called it Lollapalooza, and that is because they saw this as something that was going to continue beyond Jane's Addiction. So even before the thing launched, they had it in mind, like this could be something more than just a send-off.

for Jane's addiction. And the funny thing is, I mean, and maybe they were right to break up because they almost don't even make it through the first show. I mean, Dave and Perry, right. Come to blows day one of the festival. And like, who knows if they're even going to have day two, but they, they managed to write, uh,

And I think the one other funny thing about that is we talked to Dave Navarro for the book. Tom actually interviewed him and Dave was like, I didn't even know that it was a Jane's Addiction farewell tour. He was like, I thought we were just touring. So, you know, I mean, everybody has their, their story, right. And they're sticking to it.

on a time as a flat circle level, the fight that you describe on the very first night of La Palooza between Navarro and Perry Farrell is basically the same fight that seems to have ended the band 35 years later or whatever. So obviously, those guys either never made much progress interpersonally or managed to make progress right back to where they basically ended the first time. Look, they were volatile people. And I think also, probably somebody who's

brain was formed in a standard fashion, that functioned in a standard fashion, would not be like, all right, we're going to do this festival, call it Lollapalooza, and then have booths. And we're going to have the, you know, I want the NRA next to Greenpeace. It's a really, he really had this huge

for this thing, and they basically kind of executed it. I mean, I know that, like, probably in the background, there's other... The communal burrito that he wanted for food for people did not come to pass, thankfully, because no one died on any Lollapalooza, but that might have been the thing that did it. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm obsessed with that. Explain that for a second. He was very serious about this. And I've talked to Perry about his very ambitious wild plans for various things, like some kind of virtual reality village he was doing in Las Vegas. And it's always mixed between, are you completely out there? Is there something to this? So this is a case where one of his ideas did pan out and still is a festival to this day. But yes, he had this image. He apparently was obsessed with this idea that there'd be one giant burrito that everyone could eat who attended the festival.

Yeah, it was going to be like a giant burrito and you came and you ate as much of it as you wanted. It's truly like the most prodigious health hazard you could think of. But that was what he was really going for. You know, like this like be-in sort of thing. And

Yeah, I don't think a person who thinks inside the box and whose brain is sort of super linear would ever even go that far. Practicality is not his thing, and that worked for the festival because there were other people to do that. Get in the zone, AutoZone.

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One great thing about that story, too, is that it comes up in the book in the context of one of the organizers, the agent Don Muller, who is Pearl Jam's agent, trying to convince Perry that Pearl Jam needs to be on the 1992 tour, which Perry does not want. But Perry does want communal burritos, giant communal burritos. So, like, no Pearl Jam, yes, giant communal burritos. And thankfully, he did not get...

what he wanted, you know, and we got Pearl Jam instead. You know, to take a step back, the other thing that this book is about is sort of the birth and perhaps death of quote unquote alternative. And I lived through all this and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. It's one of those things, it's sort of hard to pin down what the hell it really was or was supposed to be. We know what it came out of. It came out of

college rock and indie rock of the 80s and then it became something else in the 90s but what the real ethos was or what it really was I think still escapes me and I think one of the most interesting things is you point out in the book that the holdovers from the 80s which was like

Jesus and Mary Chain, Susie and the Banshees, they are not well received at the festivals. They realize that this whole other thing has come in, which is really a hard rock metal thing, has taken over this sort of much more truly alternative thing of the 80s. And I think that's part of it. It's like,

Did the alternative of the 80s conquer the world, or did a totally different cool virus infect that scene and take over by actually just becoming the new thing that appealed to kids who just wanted to rock out? I think we might all agree that it's more like the latter. My conclusion is that there's really two 90s going on simultaneously. People are trying to make it one thing.

but it really isn't. And like, you know, and I've said this before, cause props are due to him. Like in a, in a way this book is actually the sequel to our band could be your life by Michael Azar, which is one of the like three great rock books of all time where he chronicles the eighties bands working outside of the musical mainstream. I think with the, with alternative rock in the nineties, first of all,

and bear with me here, 91 Lollapalooza is very different from 1992 Lollapalooza because 1991 Lollapalooza is really this band of outsiders proving that there's enough curious kids out there

to fill these large venues, you know? But these are still the kids who are like kinda clued in, going to record stores, you know, like curious. But by 1992, Nevermind by Nirvana has come out and literally changed everything. So like MTV is different, radio is different, and that creates the sort of, I think, central tension of '90s alternative rock, which is like you have these people who had fancied themselves

outsiders, and more importantly, fancying themselves to be cool, which is the central desire of all 90s

rock musicians was to be cool, right? And suddenly they're sort of like not cool because they are the mainstream bands. And so you have this ongoing tension through the whole decade of bands who grew up thinking like outside of the mainstream, but suddenly their fans are the every kid. And the ones that make it, like you said, are hard rock bands, really. You know, they're loud guitar rock bands.

and the kid who's their fan might have been a Motley Crue fan like seven years earlier. And the other bands who are really actually like the arty bands do not fare as well, A, on radio and record sales, and B, on Lollapalooza, like Pavement Bombs, Jesus Lizard Bombs. It doesn't bring these two things together, really. People try to do it, but it's two totally different aesthetics. It's like the mainstream kid, and then like indie rock still going. You know,

you know, alternative of the nineties did in many ways start with Jane's addiction. And the moment when Perry Farrell, after his older weirder band joined up with these guys in Jane's addiction who are perceived on the scenes as these, as someone says in the book, like these wannabe arena rockers is the moment when the sort of the weird eighties merges with this much bigger Zeppelin thing. And, and,

this new possibility of a much bigger thing opens up for the nineties. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, Jane's Addiction really are a true alternative band. Like, they are combining these two disparate things into something that is new. I mean, a lot of the other bands that you see that have a lot of success on Ballapalooza, like, I mean, like Tom was just saying, and we've talked about this, they're hard rock bands, and they're sort of in this, swept up in this alternative thing, but like Soundgarden, Alice in Chains,

you know, Pearl Jam, even like the Chili Peppers, like they're just sort of big riff bands raging against the machine tool, right? Smashing pumpkins. So at the end of the day, it's like still what works in America are the big riffs, right? The big fist pumping riffs, especially if you're going to be in an arena or in a shed, like that is what is going to translate. And that's part of the reason why, as you were saying before, your British bands that are on it, your Jesus and Barry chains and Susie, like they don't,

as well. I mean, Lush in 92, I think Mickey from Lush who, who gives great insight into the tour and had a great time on the tour. Like she says something to that extent. And she's like, it was all a bit American and a bit silly, you know? And that's kind of what she means by it. It was just these big brawny, you know, hard rockers that they were surrounded by because that's what plays in America, whether you call it glamorized,

glam metal or hair metal or hard rock or alternative rock. People want big riffs. So, 91, before we move on, the lineup was Jane's Addiction, Suzy and the Banshees, Living Color, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T, often with Body Count, Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band, Fishbone, and apparently Violent Femmes did a few shows. One takeaway is that I went back and listened to a bootleg of Nine Inch Nails at one of the shows. There's a full audio.

And they were incredible at that point. You know, some stuff from the 90s now sounds old to me. They don't sound old at all. It's incredible what they were doing in 1991. They were like seven years ahead of everything.

But you have that thing about the infamous show where all their shit melted. The first show. Yeah, the first show. Which kind of shows how they were so ahead of their time that they didn't realize that their equipment would melt and prevent them from performing. And that they should not plug all of it. What happens is they've literally plugged all of their backing tracks and equipment into one thing.

electrical outlet. I wonder if they just had like a power strip or something that they overloaded, you know? So, you know, that's the thing too, is like that first Lollapalooza, like everybody's flying completely by the seat of their pants, but Nine Inch Nails, I think along with maybe Rage Against the Machine, Tool, are like the super success stories of Lollapalooza, like the bands that just went in and by all accounts just destroyed everybody every night. And

emerged with just like this new, like sort of sparkle to them that like this was the band that won Lollapalooza this year. It was also interesting to read about Ice-T hanging out with everyone and the fact that he would get up and perform with Jane's Addiction. And then to also be reminded again, speaking of ahead of his time and how he was doing rap rock on stage several years before that became one of the biggest genres in the world. I think he deserves perhaps a bit more credit than he gets on that front. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, I mean, Ice-T to me is like one of the sort of like stars of the whole thing. I mean, he's great in the book also just in terms of his insight, but he really sort of embodies the Lollapalooza ideal, right? Because in 1991, you weren't seeing hip hop artists with rock artists really. And, you know, if you were doing a show like this in middle America, like these kids were not seeing this kind of stuff. So they're getting probably exposed to it live for the first time.

So you have Ice-T doing his rap show, but then you also have him doing Body Count. And these are some of their first shows. I think they had just done a handful of shows in LA before going on Lollapalooza. And they're bringing this rap metal hybrid out there, you know, played by an all-black band. It's like not something that you've really seen. So you're getting that, and you're getting them playing songs like Cop Killer.

I know your family's grieving. Which obviously, you know, that becomes what it becomes not long after. And then, as you mentioned, you have Ice-T going on stage with Jane's Addiction every night. And they're doing this Sly Stone song where...

you know, Perry and ice sort of face off and they're shouting racial epithets to each other on stage. And they'd start the whole thing where Perry would be up there. And then at some point ice would like walk up behind him as his arms crossed. And, you know, Perry would pretend he didn't know he was there.

Um, and then they'd go into this whole thing and they're, you know, shouting these things at each other. And then they would start dancing together across the stage. Um, this is like a radical thing to do. You know, it's not something you saw otherwise in 1991. It's not really something you see now. Um, and they were bringing this thing across the country and doing this every night. And like, that was something, you know, Lollapalooza actually did do some things that were like brand new. And that, that was definitely one of them.

And yeah, by 92, everything's changed. 91 was kind of like the prelude. And then all of a sudden it turns out that it was at the tip of this wave that's turning into a tsunami. Uh, so it's completely crazy and they have Pearl Jam, but Pearl Jam, uh,

Pearl Jam, first of all, Perry didn't want them. Second of all, they are playing second on the bill where like Rollins Band was playing the year before. So they're playing so early that it's a logistical nightmare to even get people because all the kids suddenly wanted to see the band at the bottom of the bill. So it was difficult to even get kids into the venue in time to see Pearl Jam and they all wanted to.

You don't really think about that, but like Stuart Ross, one of the guys, explains to us, like, usually you have all day to get everybody in to see the headliner. Pearl Jam literally, yeah, they got booked before, but by the time they're on Lollapalooza, they're literally becoming the biggest band in the world.

as Lollapalooza goes. And it's like, I think right after Lollapalooza that Eddie Vedder ends up on the cover of Time Magazine, you know? So it's like incredible. And they're on early in the day and the kids, they literally, they knew that if Pearl Jam started and they didn't have the kids in the venue, that the fences were coming down. And

There were a lot of times during Pearl Jam's show where they were quote-unquote afraid they were going to lose the venue. Like, literally, that's just when it spirals out of control. And Eddie Vedder was amazing during that. He was still... He was sort of like this pre...

Pearl Jam closing ranks Eddie Vedder. He's drinking bile with the Freak Show, with the Jim Rose Circus. You know, he's still hanging out with people. He's putting his face in glass with them, too. He's completely, every show, climbing, you know, all of the scaffolding of the stages, jumping in the audience. He gets left at a truck stop. Like, he's still...

enjoying and sort of like this this not the eddie vetter that we come to know maybe a couple years later and you know the band is just riding the publicist even describes it like riding this tiger of of success and it's really a magical time for them and and like again like you said with nine inch deals before that's the band that everybody talks about from that tour we we

had Kim fail at a book event a couple days ago, and he was saying just like how completely crazy it was. And they were also given the opportunity to move up the bill actually, and chose not to because,

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bizarre in retrospect habit of you know climbing hundreds of feet in the air and climbing the scaffolding I look at that now as an adult I look at those videos and I'm just like what the hell are you doing and it's good to know that even everyone in the band was actually quite concerned about him the thing to remember as you point out people like him and Chris Cornell were super athletic dudes they were really good at climbing shit and everything they were the Benson Boone's of their time yes that's what they were going for

But nonetheless, it was an insane thing to be doing. He was way too high. And there were times when he'd come down and the organizers would think he must have broken something. So it's hard to say. And then, yeah, the drinking bile shit is absolutely repugnant. I think that was the stuff I had never... Like I said, I had no sympathy for that whole...

side show freak show thing. I never understood what that had to do with anything, but I guess that was just, that was just part of the thing. It was part of like, go see some weird shit. Yeah. And I think, well, it's interesting because one of the things that I didn't realize this until we started doing the book and talking to these guys, but the side show thing didn't come out of nowhere either. Like they were pretty deeply embedded in the Seattle scene. Yeah. And you know,

Soundgarden guys knew them. Kurt Cobain was coming to their stuff. Mark Arnn from Mudhoney. So they were in that world. And they kind of embodied the whole alternative thing maybe better than any of the bands because that really was an alternative to everything. We went deep interviewing all those dudes like Jim Rose, of course, and the Torture King and Mr. Lifto and Slug the Sword Swallower. I had to flag Rich. He was at his 19th

Pre-share performer. Yeah. And I was like, I think maybe we got, maybe you got it, dude. I was like, the story is not complete. It's not there yet until it was complete. When we got, I think the story from Al Jorgensen about drinking a cocktail and

through Mr. Lipto's penis, through his Prince Albert piercing and then out his penis. So that was the capper, I think, on the story. But yeah, around the time you guys were talking about drinking the stomach bowel, I remembered how that stuff always made me literally nauseous, even reading about it back in the day. And it made me nauseous again 30 years later. So congratulations. The 90s, kids, you had to be there. It was...

In the 60s, it was free love. In the 90s, it was like proving you were cool by drinking someone's stomach bile. We had to prove that we weren't hippies by just doing repugnant shit. But yeah.

The other thing was, was it Gibby Haynes from Butthole Surfers who had the shotgun? Yes. Yeah. That is some crazy shit. The thing, getting back again to the playing in the daytime thing, is that Butthole Surfers were accustomed at that time to playing smaller clubs where they had crazy projections going behind them. You know, they had like lighting the drums on fire. It was a whole...

situation that was not going to translate onto a midday stage at Lollapalooza. And so, Gibby Haynes' solution

to that was to bring a shotgun on stage that had blanks in it, but blanks will still take off your head at like 10 feet. And he would come out and chastise the audience for not having rocked out hard enough to the Rollins band. And then just shoot the gun over the audience, which like is so...

impossible to conceive of in this day and age. But that was his way. And he even did it, he brought it on stage with Suzy once to cover Helter Skelter. He was wearing a dress that he strips out of. And then he's firing over the audience and Suzy finally gets annoyed and tackles him. And we have photos in the book, like a time-lapse photography of Suzy

Susie and Gibby Haynes wrestling for the shotgun. And like Paul Leary from Butthole Surfers, who was on stage there, says he was like, yeah, I was rocking out and with my eyes closed and I suddenly looked down and Susie and Gibby Haynes are right there and the guns pointed at my head and it's like four feet from my head. And he said, I jumped like six feet into the air. It was completely irresponsible. Mm-hmm.

But, you know, spectacular. And we're talking about it 30 years later. The 90s. But still, no communal burritos, but like shotguns aimed at the audience. That's what that is. So 93, most notably, Rage Against the Machine. Primus headlined...

But yeah, you had Rage Against the Machine at the very beginning of their whole thing. And that's when they did their infamous show. Even in the book, people were confused. Why did they come out doing a protest against the PMRC, which was the censorious parents group in Washington, D.C. that was really more an 80s thing. They were sort of retroactively protesting this thing from the 80s in 1993. They did it in Philadelphia for some reason. Yeah.

They couldn't agree to the terms. They were negotiating amongst themselves how the whole situation was going to go down. And by the time they had ironed it out, they were in Philadelphia. It was supposed to be D.C. Yeah. And...

I think I might have learned from this book for the first time that when one of the members of Rage Against the Machine, how do I put this, thought that as part of their protest where they came out naked on stage that he would actually masturbate on stage but then couldn't really pull it off, so to speak. So that part of the protest was unsuccessful. Well, like as George Costanza said, there's an aspect of shrinkage, I think, that goes on in certain situations. And I think he was concerned about it being...

being exposed for all the world to see and not his best, you know, state. But it was an incredible thing because rage against the machine really actually also managed to turn all of that day's Lollapalooza against them because like they came out naked with their instruments on and, and, you know, they just stand there with KMRC written across their chests, you know, and, and,

Their guitars are just feeding back. And like, apparently for the first five minutes, the audience was totally stoked. They're like, this is the coolest thing we've ever seen in our lives. And then like minutes five to 10, like confusion and a little bit of frustration starts to set in where they're like, are they going to play bomb track? You know, like what's going on. And then, but apparently after the 10 minutes, like the audience completely, uh,

turns on rage and just starts throwing things at them and most particularly coins at their privates. And apparently, according to the band, it was actually pretty painful and very super weird to be up there once the audience was

went dark on them. I mean, they didn't actually play any music. So it was, it's one of those things where it's more fun as an anecdote than it is, is that probably to experience, to be honest, on both sides from the audience and on stage. But, and then 1994, as you chronicle in great detail that almost in an alternate world, it would have been the greatest Lollapalooza ever. And possibly one of the greatest traveling shows ever. It was going to be

Nirvana, the Beasties, and Smashing Pumpkins as the headliners. As soon as Kurt had his overdose in Rome, that was out the window. And then, of course, he was gone.

What we found out and really what Tom really found out because he went deep on 94 was that that was really closer to happening than we all then we definitely assumed. I mean, like the the ink was like dry on the contracts basically and like doing this thing, you know, but I think that and Tom could probably speak to it in more detail. But I think that the interesting thing is like and somebody on the law of physics side says like maybe it wouldn't have even been better if

if Nirvana had played because it wound up being such a successful year anyway. And Nirvana may have just kind of eclipsed the whole Lollapalooza itself because they were such a phenomenon and so massive at that time that, you know, Lollapalooza may have ceased to be Lollapalooza in a way had Nirvana been at the top of the bill. And what they wound up with was really like a

a brilliant year otherwise. I think that 94 is really for me the sweet spot of going back to what we were talking about before of like indie and alternative and what's alternative. Somehow in 1994 between Beastie Boys and the Breeders on the main stage and L7, completely

combined with like the big arena rock of Smashing Pumpkins and an ascendant Green Day like somehow for me they thread the needle that year yes as a side note we should mention there's an amazing bit about Perry Farrell for some reason became convinced that Green Day were an actual boy band assembled by the label and he really

Flat-out refused to have them on and then only let them on for half the shows is crazy really funny Yeah, there's these times where Perry is is is wrong, right? And he gets overridden and Billy Joe Armstrong talks about and look he was they were super bummed out because they loved Jane's addiction He also like the first minute of the interview. He's just like Perry was just being a straight-up dick you know, like but I

It does speak to, and I'll give Perry credit for this, he really, whether it was always accurate, his curatorial sense was to keep this thing really edgy. And when you look at...

the history of Lollapalooza over the seven years and think about the bands that could have been on Lollapalooza and drawn really well and weren't, you can see that they were really pretty diligent. I mean, there's no Bush on Lollapalooza. There's no Live on Lollapalooza. There's no Stone Temple Pilots. There almost was, but they really tried to toe this line aesthetically. And again, 94-0 where they just, I think, they nail it and then are never able to

you know replicate it again I don't think I mean Billy Corgan and Smashing Pumpkins do not come off super well in this and I was saying before we started that you

I've talked to Billy, and he's very convincing when he talks about how people had a lot of indie snobbery, and they always looked down on the pumpkins unfairly because they obviously were great. And I've always kind of been sympathetic to that point of view. But in this book, you really get a sense that at that time, and it doesn't mean that that's how he is now, but at that time, Billy was kind of being a dick to everyone. Yeah, I mean, certainly. And even like Wayne Coyne, I think, calls him...

a raging asshole, which I just think is a very good term to use. And like, and he's not only just talking about 94, he's like, I won't, if I see that guy nowadays, like backstage somewhere, he's like, I I'm just turning around walking the other way. Like he wants nothing to do with him. And like, you know, I mean the Billy thing too, it's like,

It's funny because, like, look, he's a real artist, right? And, like, his perceived elevated sense of ego, if that's what it was, like, is also probably what fuels that music. Because Smashing Pumpkins music is extremely indulgent and over the top, sort of controlled by him to a very, you know, intense level.

intense degree. And that's also what makes it awesome. So like that was probably his personality for better or worse, but you put it at the top of a bill like that, where it is, you know, there is this sort of indie, even if a lot of these bands are big, there's this indie sensibility amongst these bands. And Billy Corgan does not embody that indie sensibility. Like he's talking about like loving, you know, bands like Boston and just making big riffs and big gestures. And that's not, Lollapalooza isn't necessarily, um,

the place for that in 1994. So he definitely rubs a lot of people the wrong way. It was fucking fascinating because like, if there had been a minute mitigating quote, like if somebody had said during the course of this book, I don't understand what everybody was talking about. Billy was totally fucking cool. Like that would be in the book, but that did not occur. Like we don't have that quote did not happen. If I had to, um,

perceive it with maximum sympathy. It's one of those things where you assume everyone hates you and you come in with a big chip on your shoulder. And then it's, it's like, you know, it's sort of like the angry nerd kind of thing. I think that, I think that there's probably a bit of that, but the beastie boys in 94 who were just like the coolest dudes on earth, but also kind of self-consciously the coolest dudes on earth and smashing pumpkins in 94, you can just feel the apples and oranges thing like that. That was just not going to vibe. Yeah.

Yeah. And they, they say, you know, somebody in the book says that there's no two people who are more diametrically opposed than like Mike D and Billy Corgan. Yeah. But when Nirvana dropped off the bill, the Beastie Boys were really sort of brought in on a curatorial level as well. And they really helped.

shape that bill and the side stage and you know, let's just Jackson. So they do, I think deserve a lot of credit for that, for that year being as, as good as it did as it was. It also was really funny given that the beastie boys, like they kind of had like a basketball thing. They're even dressed up playing basketball on the cover on one cover of Rolling Stone that Robert Pollard from guided by voice to say they absolutely sucked at basketball, which is really funny. That was, um,

I'm a guided by voices person. I'm one of those guided by voices people. And reporting sort of that basketball game where Robert Pollard and his brothers just smoke the Beastie Boys and having Kelly Deal from the Breeders be like, who saw it? Being like, it was not pretty. It was not friendly. It was just one of my great pleasures doing this book. In 95, one of the most interesting things was Hole.

Sonic Youth were headlining, and they used it to earn the money that paid for the studio where they recorded for the whole rest of their career. So that was very smart of them, even if, unfortunately, the crowd was walking out during their sets. But Hole was the focus of a lot of attention. Courtney Love's antics on that tour were pretty fascinating. My favorite thing, though, is her hanging out with Shane O'Connor and then telling someone that Sinead was quote-unquote nuts.

Yeah. And I think, is it Stuart Ross who says like Courtney, you know, coming from you? Like, yeah, but yeah, I mean the, the, the Courtney stuff was something actually Tom and I had to talk a lot about because obviously there's a million stories about Courtney love on Lollapalooza in 1995. And one of my favorite is like when she's shooting baskets with Bob from pavement,

And, you know, and she keeps throwing air balls and she's getting more and more pissed. And she's yelling at Bob that he's laughing at her. And he's like, I'm not laughing at you. And she's like, fuck you, frat boy. And he's like, I'm not laughing at you. But like just this sort of terrorizing of people. But, you know, there were a million stories. But we also had to keep in mind, like, A, this is not long after COVID.

Kurt's death. Yeah, she was right. She was in deep mourning for her, for her love. It should not have been out on the road. Like this is not, you know, she's not in the right mental space to be out there to begin with. Um, and you have to take that into account. And then we also really have to take into account. It's like, okay, well, how many stories do you tell before you're just telling the same story over and over? Like the stories have to be there.

Once you have her actually assaulting Kathleen Hanna, sucker punching her in the face, it's kind of hard to...

again yeah I mean it's actually you know it's not funny at all it's terrible like she really she hurt her it's crazy but you know her road manager we interviewed her road manager this guy Curly Johnson and he really I mean first of all there is a huge amount of stuff that he was just like you cannot print this but he also at the end of the interview is like look just for the record

Cause he actually also worked with Amy Winehouse later, but he's like, just for the record, there is no way in heaven that in 2025, somebody in the condition, mental condition that Courtney love was in would be allowed to tour. Like our conception of like mental health and self-care and, and just like liability. Like she should not have been on that tour. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, yeah, that's why you had to be a little careful just, but yeah, rich really reigned me in. That was my freak, like my, my, you know, where he's like, maybe you have enough Courtney love in here. And I'm like, really? But I also have this other story. You're good, dude. You're good. If we were not like checking each other, the whole book would just be like Jim Rose and Courtney. Yeah.

It is at the same time kind of charming that she was obsessed with trying to do a crossword puzzle competition with Steve Malkmus because she knew he was smart. Yeah. I mean, that's another thing too. It's like, it seemed like she kind of,

sort of like tortured the pavement guys a little bit, you know, who are like these kind of, you know, self-professed nerdy guys on Lollapalooza. And like, you know, she's yelling at one guy for laughing at her. And then she wants to challenge, you know, Steve Malcom is to like, you know, whatever crossword puzzle competition. And, and I think, and someone in the book makes the funny quote, like in trying to express how smart Steve Malcom is like, he did crossword puzzles with a pen. Yeah.

As if like, like that is sort of the height of intellect, but like what a crazy, like 95 is a crazy group of people like pavement and Courtney love. And then Jesus lizard and Cypress Hill and Sinead O'Connor. It's like, that is some, you know, group there like traveling together over a summer. Yeah.

Thurston Moore has sort of the final word on Sonic Youth headlining, which is it definitely teetered on Spinal Tap playing at the theme park, which kind of says it all. People were not, you know, the kids were not at all interested in seeing Sonic Youth. They weren't, I mean, look, 95 with Sonic Youth headlining is also the worst box office year of Lollapalooza, which if we're going chronologically, the effects of that will be tremendous.

felt in our discussion of 1996. But it was not a success. And part of that, I think it's Lee Rinaldo who says, look, we were driving to the venue one day and we're listening to the local radio station that is sponsoring Lollapalooza and broadcasting from the event. And they did not play a single band that was actually on Lollapalooza that year because it was not Radio Rock Radio.

you know, radio rock bands. So that's really where the experiment of,

can there be like an indie Lollapalooza happens? And the answer is no. It's funny looking at 96, which was the Metallica year. I mean, it's actually an awesome lineup. Imagine being able to see Metallica sound garden, the Ramones and rancid alone. It's great. But do you know the Metallica thing was tremendously controversial on all sides? Yeah. I mean, definitely. And like, and yeah, it was a really good lineup now. I mean,

which is not to say that I went, like I certainly didn't go that year. Cause I was like Metallica, like what the, but you know, like Tom was saying, I mean, this is a reaction to 95, right. And going really indie. And they're like, okay, that didn't work. We didn't sell tickets. What are we going to do here? And they'd land on Metallica. And Perry of course, doesn't like that idea. He, he quits the whole tour and protest. Mark Iger says, well, actually Metallica was really in the spirit of Lollapalooza because it was the unexpected. Yeah.

You know, so maybe like another alternative band, Stone Temple Pilots or something would have been like, well, that's that's expected. But Metallica, no one saw that coming. So he's like, this was actually very Lollapalooza for us to do. The fans did not think so. It didn't work as far as perception. And then, you know, one of the things that I found really interesting about the Metallica story, which was the other side of it, is that it really rearranged Metallica.

the DNA of Lollapalooza from the inside. Because you had a band like Metallica, and now they're so massive that they're calling the shots. So you're playing these weird out-of-the-way places because they don't want to play the big markets because they're going on their own tour after Lollapalooza, and they don't want to saturate those markets. So they're dictating where Lollapalooza's going to play, and it's like these far out-of-the-way fields that don't have any infrastructure. So now Lollapalooza has to bring in plumbing, they have to bring in everything

And

And in 97, you can feel the wheels coming off the bus and also the 90s sort of ending in a way. By 97, the 90s as we knew them was ending and everyone was at that point trying to figure out what was next. And there was a lot of talk about electronica at the time. Perry took back control, I guess, and it

It had the prodigy. It had both orbital and the orb. Every orb act was involved. Devo, for some reason. Tool, which is cool. Snoop Doggy Dog. It's weird to call him Snoop Doggy Dog again, but that's what he was called back then. Yeah.

I feel it feels so wrong to say that I'm reading the actual lineup Snoop Dogg as we know him now It feels like your grandfather talking I know it felt so horrible saying that Yeah and then Korn One of the things that was really interesting is Some of that Woodstock 99 vibe Seems to have started to come in that year And a bunch of things One of the things was people heckling poor James With passion and love

to our great band, but played right before Korn every night.

And really, we're not going over very well with their target audience. Yeah, Korn arriving on Lollapalooza 97. One of the main founders who is no longer working says about 97, he's like, I beg Perry to shut the fucking thing down. But you know, Perry comes back in 97 and...

He does try on some level to make things edgy again. You know, he, he's the reason cause he's fascinated with dance music that suddenly you have all this electronic music on the stage. It's a valiant effort actually in a way to like see if you can shake it up. It's not at all what kids want. It's probably too early. You never win a prize for being too early in rock and roll. I don't think. But the, the,

arrival of Korn really is like that is the end of alternative rock in the beginning of new metal and It's funny because you know, I interviewed Jonathan Davis and they were totally Stoked to be on Lollapalooza like they had gone to see Lollapalooza in the early 90s It had been incredibly formative to them, you know They actually saw themselves as an alternative band because like the music is so weird but

What it does is it brings in, and again, this is when Korn is really ascendant, this massive Korn crowd who are really just there for that and to go nuts. And it does bring in that element that makes the audience incredibly hostile to the other bands. It even forces John Spencer Blues Explosion to get forced off the tour because

because they were booked. They were booked for 1997. And then when Korn got added, Korn were like, well, we are not playing before John Spencer Blues Explosion because we have a platinum record. And so they go to John Spencer Blues Explosion and they say, will you perform before Korn? And John Spencer is like, we have a contract with you.

to play when we are. And so basically, John Spencer ends up getting a payout to not play Lollapalooza so Korn can be on it. And arguably, really, Korn is the one thing on that tour with Tool that the Rock kids are coming to see. But it is definitely like, well, that is, if you've got the dinosaurs and then suddenly the little mammals running around their feet and the dinosaurs are like, what is this? What's going on? That's really the moment. I mean...

That is the next phase of music and of sort of like the guitar hard rock that will sort of capture the imagination of American teens for the next 10 years.

Yeah. And what's wild is if you look at this year's Lollapalooza lineup, because as you talk about in your epilogue, the weird thing is this thing survived in a much bigger form, but also one that has very little connection, increasingly little connection to its roots. It's now like this international stationary festival. And in the Chicago iteration, it's,

This year on July 31st, the first year really where there are no big rock headliners, there's only one rock headliner. And as it happens, it's Korn. So there you go.

Yeah. That's, that's the surprise. I mean, but I think that look like, I mean, Lollapalooza in its current iteration, isn't that different from any of the other festivals, right? You sort of see the same mix of headliners. It's going to be your pop artists and your hip hop art artists, and like maybe a rock artist in there, um, some dance stuff and like, they're all doing the same thing, but that's not really a knock on Lollapalooza because they're actually all doing it kind of because a lot of Lollapalooza like Coachella and all these, all of these festivals, the

are doing what they're doing because of Lollapalooza to some extent. Even though Coachella was a standalone destination festival before Lollapalooza became one, like Coachella in the early days actually was helped by the Lolla organizers when it was struggling. And like Jane's Addiction actually reformed, I think for the 99 Coachella as a headliner to help give them a little boost, which sort of kicked off Coachella having these big reunion bands, you know,

for a lot of the years and Perry was involved in that. So like Lollapalooza is now one of many, but it's because of Lollapalooza that there are many. And that's kind of what happened in the nineties too. Like Lollapalooza was a victim of its own success because then there was Horde and there was Warped Tour and there was Lilith Fair and there was Ozfest and all these things probably wouldn't have existed without Lollapalooza. And then, you know, the space just became too crowded for Lollapalooza to continue on as it had.

I think it is finally, we're getting to like that 30 year mark for corn. I think it's their time. Like my friends have like 13 year old kids. You know, my friend was like, my son's girlfriend came over and she's wearing like really baggy black jeans and she has like corn rows and she's really into corn.

Like, so it is, it is the time. It's time. I agree. I agree. I can feel it, but yeah. So the book is, and we only scratched the surface. I encourage everyone to check it out. The book is La Palooza, the uncensored story of alternative rocks, wildest festival. So Richard Beanstalk and Tom Beaujour, thank you so much for joining us again.

Thank you so much for having us again. It's been great, yeah. And that's our show. We'll be back next week. In the meantime, subscribe to Rolling Stone Music Now wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify because that's always appreciated. But as always, thanks so much for listening and we will see you next week. This is a mini meditation guided by Bombas. Repeat after me. I'm comfy. Comfy.

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